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Reposting from the other thread: Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is left but plain text and ads, to thunderous appl

Reposting from the other thread: Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive for it. I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332

mediaman 8y ago
You're advocating for auto-playing videos and sound, proprietary resource-gobbling flash content, and the nonconsensual abuse of user data? Yes, what a golden age that was. It is a much more persuasive argument that the new controls are simply a reaction to bad actors who corrupted the value the original web provided. Sure, when the internet was a smaller village, nobody needed to lock their door: but then the village turned into the city, and locks became necessary. It seems strange to blame the locks for the reason they are needed.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  I find GDPR overreaching enough to be worse than its absence.
  - angus-prune 8y ago
    What negative impacts have you seen from GDPR?
dec0dedab0de 8y ago
How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images I know you're being facetious, but I liked the internet so much better when I used to browse with images off by default. It could be that I was an optimistic 14 year old, or even simple nostalgia, but the internet felt like a cool friendly place back then.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  You can still do that and it's fully usable. I used to do that in Firefox with a nice extension that gave some buttons on the extension bar to toggle things when I was tethering to my phone data. Unfortunately not available on the new extension system.

mediaman 8y ago

You're advocating for auto-playing videos and sound, proprietary resource-gobbling flash content, and the nonconsensual abuse of user data? Yes, what a golden age that was. It is a much more persuasive argument that the new controls are simply a reaction to bad actors who corrupted the value the original web provided. Sure, when the internet was a smaller village, nobody needed to lock their door: but then the village turned into the city, and locks became necessary. It seems strange to blame the locks for the reason they are needed.

jimmaswell 8y ago
I find GDPR overreaching enough to be worse than its absence.
- angus-prune 8y ago
  What negative impacts have you seen from GDPR?

dec0dedab0de 8y ago

How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images I know you're being facetious, but I liked the internet so much better when I used to browse with images off by default. It could be that I was an optimistic 14 year old, or even simple nostalgia, but the internet felt like a cool friendly place back then.

jimmaswell 8y ago
You can still do that and it's fully usable. I used to do that in Firefox with a nice extension that gave some buttons on the extension bar to toggle things when I was tethering to my phone data. Unfortunately not available on the new extension system.